The University of Pennsylvania Has a Drinking Problem

My dad got his Ph.D. at Penn back in the ’60s, when he already had a wife and family. Which makes it sort of strange that we kids grew up knowing all of Penn’s drinking songs, but none of Temple’s, where Dad had been an undergrad (on the GI Bill). He would sing us to sleep at night by strumming the ukulele and soulfully crooning: Hurrah! Hurrah, Pennsylvania! Hurrah for the red and the blue!

Perhaps he thought this would someday give us a leg up in getting admitted to the Ivy League. It worked, I guess; my sister went to Penn. Now my daughter is a grad student there. When she started last fall, she called to tell me about the first “mixer” (they still call them “mixers”!) she’d attended. She and her fellow students at the School of Social Policy and Practice (99 percent female, by Marcy’s report) were invited by the graduate students of Penn Engineering (99 percent male) for drinks and snacks. The engineers aren’t stupid. Those studying to be social workers are, generally, big-hearted women who care about underdogs. Nonetheless, Marcy told me, without the open bar, the evening would have been a bust.

She isn’t much of a drinker, but lately she’s taken an interest in wine. “I found out I like riesling,” she’ll tell me, or “My new fave is sauvignon blanc.” At least, she used to tell me, when there was a state store at Penn where she could buy wine to experiment with. But in January, the Penn state store at 41st and Market—“sort of a scary place,” she’d said—abruptly closed. There was no warning, and Marcy didn’t even realize it until she saw an article in the Daily Pennsylvanian. “Well, hell,” she grumbled, “where am I supposed to buy wine now?”

The online version of the Daily Pennsylvanian article, no doubt thanks to some engineering student, featured an interactive map of area state stores. There’s one at 49th and Baltimore, about two miles from Marcy’s apartment. There’s one at 19th and Chestnut, also two miles distant. And there’s one at 24th and South, likewise two miles away. “I am not walking four miles in the dead of winter to buy a bottle of wine!” Marcy, who doesn’t have a car, declared. “Can you come drive me, please?”

So after work one night, before I headed to the suburbs, I took her to the liquor store at 24th and South—the one I frequented when I first moved to the city, in the ’70s. The area has changed. So has the liquor store. “They’re so nice in there!” Marcy marveled, hauling her bottles into the car where I waited. “These Penn frat guys were in line, and they were laughing and saying, ‘The LCB lost a lot of business when our state store closed!’ And the clerk said, ‘Nah, the business just moved.’”

“When I used to shop here,” I told her, “they kept all the bottles in the back, behind a counter. You couldn’t see them. You had to tell the clerk what you wanted.”

“Why did they do that?”

“Because liquor is sinful.”

She snorted. “I bought a pinot grigio to try.” Then she turned thoughtful. “Some people are saying Penn wanted the state store closed, to cut down on student drinking. You don’t think they’d do that, do you?”

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Bob

Great story!

Catherine

Hurry up and open that new store soon so all of the awful annoying Penn students will stop coming to the bar where I work! (PS Who is in graduate school and needs their daddy to drive them to a liquor store?? oh Penn….)

Just Penn?

And Drexel students don’t drink? What about Temple? I’m pretty all college kids drink…this is just ridiculous

Please

Please go back to writing your Romance novels. Have to imagine they are better than the drivel you come up with whenever you write these misinformed piece about Penn students.

Stop

Agreed w/ @Please — just because you’re the only one in your family who couldn’t get into Penn doesn’t mean you need to write these halfass rants on campus issues without any original reporting to speak of. Maybe you could get a byline in the DP’s summer edition.

Geez

This lady’s daughter needs to suck it up and take the subway.

Seriously, Sandy?

There’s just no point to this article. The only thing that I got out of it was that the writer’s daugher is a brat who still needs her mommy to drive her places. So Sandy, either stop complaining about a closed state store or tell your daugher to take a cab.

http://underthebutton.com Under the Button

Hey Sandy,

We’re the undergraduate student life blog at Penn and we think your article misses the mark entirely. Got a minute?

This is one of the dumbest, most poorly written article I’ve seen in quite awhile.

Tom

Dee: When you call something dumb and poorly written, you should really check your spelling. #potkettleblack

Confused

I don’t understand the point of the article. Your title “The University of Pennsylvania Has a Drinking Problem” is sensationalist at best. It would be one thing if the article actually discussed alcohol abuse on Penn’s campus; however, your issue is more about the closing of a liquor store. Don’t even get me started on this “conspiracy theory” BS. I wouldn’t have minded a discussion of Penn’s alcohol issues, but the title to this article, “The University of Pennsylvania Has a Drinking Problem,” is nothing more than a “bait-and-switch.” It reflects an author who relies on sensationalist one-liners to draw attention to a poorly written and researched article.

Jana

The store on 24th and South is about 15 minutes from campus…. nowhere near the 2 mile claim in the article.

Reason & Logic

I have no doubt that many of these comments are from angry Penn students, after the post by Under the Button. As a Penn student myself, I think that alcohol and drug use on campus is an issue that needs to be addressed. Anyone who disagrees with that either hasn’t seen the statistics from Spring Fling (99 “crime incidents,” 45 hospitalizations over the course of one weekend) or is choosing to ignore them.

Clearly, there are some cringe-worthy aspects (for example, I find it a little comedic that the author describes her father as crooning Penn songs over the ukulele and think it actually takes away from what could have been a serious article). And, the perspective of a grad is VERY different than that of an undergrad (a lot of the student life initiatives are centered around undergrads), so it may have been helpful for the author to show she had more several undergrad perspectives as well as that of her daughter. Additionally, I wouldn’t say the research here is poor (nothing said was completely incorrect) but the argument can be made that it is incomplete (the LCB struck down the idea of having a new store where Risque Video now exists). Of course, I have no idea when this article was submitted for publication, so it may well have been correct at the time it was written.

That said, there are a number of issues raised by this article that I hear repeatedly between other students, but have never seen anyone bold enough to make these statements in an article. For one, the alcohol policy at Penn is a joke. Nobody cares about it or enforces it (by enforces it, I mean enforces it well).

Additionally, the honest remarks made by the author about her attempts to get information from Penn reflects a deep-seated problem we have in our University. We have the tendency to shuffle people around, from source to source, as a means of letting bureaucracy prevent the truth from coming out (whether this is with the UA, the Office of Alcohol and Other Drugs, or the Office of University Communications, or any other group at Penn that deals with bureaucracy).

The truth, in this instance, is that Penn doesn’t always handle things the way it knows it should. Take, for example, the Alcohol Policy. Normally, Greek and non-Greek groups will have their budgets frozen, be de-recognized, and have the individuals involved sanctioned heavily (in the most recent incident, AEPi was caught hazing and decided to be de-recognized after they were threatened with two years of social sanctions). However, the University blatantly disregards this policy whenever it wants to; after the UA was found guilty of hazing, all its members had to do was attend a single hour-long session on hazing education! And, to top it off, they were invited to continue working on the Alcohol Policy! Now, this doesn’t mean Penn conspired to close anything (I still don’t find that argument reasonable) but it does raise the issues of bureaucracy, secrecy, and favoritism, which run rampant across the University (want another example? Look at how the dean of the GSE was allowed to remain dean even after he was caught falsifying his credentials. That is, until a newspaper reporter came poking around and the University decided to get rid of him at that point.

So, is this article perfect? Absolutely not. Could it have been done better if more perspectives of Penn students had been taken into consideration? Sure. But it also starts a public conversation about things that we don’t really talk about outside of our cliques- things that we need to talk about, if we’re going to improve. Anyone insulting the author and her daughter (or piling on to the ad hominem attacks) is doing a disservice to Penn and its future students. We should be examining the problems this article raises more critically, and looking at how to fix them, instead of trying to shame those who shed light on the truth.

http://RuthEllenEisen1@yahoo.com Ruth Eisen

Too bad your daughter can’t think of anything else to do but drink her brains out, when she is getting a graduate degree and lives in Philadelphia, which offers a weath of activities (artistic, musical, historical, athletic, cultural, etc.). So far, you haven’t convinced me though that Penn does have a drinking problem to begin with. Maybe you should drive her to a detox program!

Alycia

Your daughter got accepted to Penn but doesn’t know how to take the 40 bus to the liquor store and back? I guess going to an Ivy for grad school in social work isn’t very bright, so maybe this isn’t so surprising.

http://UPPhilly.com Ari

The tagline is so sensationalist for such little backing. The only facts in this piece are that the LCB had issues with the management. Nobody from the LCB or UPenn implied that UPenn pressured LCB to shut down, and considering the 41st and market store served to tons of non-students in the area, I doubt that UPenn would have conspired to close them down. Backed with the news that LCB is building a new store, albeit by the time everyone affected has graduated and moved on, shows how silly this article’s key thesis is.